Wrestlers

On the 22nd of May 1899, Eakins had two athletes climb to his fourth-floor studio on Mount Vernon Street in Philadelphia and lock into a wrestling hold, one man pinning the other in a half nelson. A journalist friend had brought them, and one was a local boxer named Joseph McCann. Eakins photographed the pair before he painted them, as he had studied horses and runners in motion for years, convinced a painter should know exactly how a body works. He was in his fifties by then, pushed out of his teaching post over his insistence on drawing from the nude, and this was his last great sporting picture. He later gave the finished canvas to the National Academy as the diploma required for his membership.